More Modest and More Urgent
“Compare a modern scholarly biblical commentary with one by Calvin. The difference is not simply the availability to the modern writer of considerably more by way of historical materials, but a changed relation to the text itself and to the act of explication. A modern scholarly commentator has the task of accounting for the text, and a set of tools at her disposal to establish how the text came to be. Calvin’s task is at once more modest and more urgent: more modest, because he is simply interested in eliciting the plain sense of the text; more urgent, because his rhetoric positions the reader in such a way as to be accountable to the text, or better, to be called to account by God through the medium of the text. Hence a fundamental criterion for the success of a piece of exegesis is its ability to let the rhetoric of Scripture stand and itself shape the theologian’s discourse.”
[John Webster, ‘Theological Theology’ in Confessing God, 21]
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